Becoming Parentless
I never thought I’d be on the verge of this life journey at the age of 45. My children are 24 and 25, and I’m sandwiched in the Xennial/Gen-X space.
It’s extra crazy since we were the generation left largely on our own through childhood. Housing costs, college costs, inflation, a post-pandemic medical care crisis, the sudden death of my 68-year-old dad, and three layoffs in four years. It’s destroyed any chance I had in retirement and opened my eyes to the healthcare crisis that our generation faces, as our Boomer parents are starting to die unusually young, compared to their Greatest Generation parents.
My children and I chose to live together following the death of my father in 2021. My career field in tech has been in decline due to mass layoffs and a lack of hiring at decent wages. I didn’t think things could get worse and had high hopes we were finally turning the tide on the roughest of it.
Life had other plans, which may end up being the title of my autobiography someday.
My mother, who was 68 and the live-in caregiver for my rather spry 94-year-old grandmother, suddenly had a hemorrhagic stroke last Halloween night, and my life has been in a hellish stasis ever since.
Since the pandemic in 2020, we’ve lost my grandfather at 94, my former father-in-law at 71, and my father. All of our patriarchal figures vanished in a flash. Those are pretty significant deaths, and I don’t believe I was fully healed after those events, so when my mother had her stroke, it tore the floor from under my feet.
My sisters and I jumped on the way from Florida, where we were all residing, to get to Pennsylvania, where my family lives, including my mom.
Having been disappointed with my extended family’s lack of support and consolation when my father passed away, I didn’t know what to expect from my mother’s siblings. They had a very combative and competitive relationship for my entire life, but that was how my family is, and a large reason I chose to move out of their limited sphere of influence when I was finally an adult.
To say that my grandparents spoiled their kids is an understatement. My mother and both of her siblings were financially irresponsible, and as a result, it compromised my grandmother’s income after my grandfather passed away. They essentially got their inheritance over the course of their adult lives.
They don’t see it that way, and while we all tried to get along the first few weeks while we were at my mother’s bedside daily for 8 — 12 hour shifts, congeniality didn’t last long.
My aunt and uncle wanted control of everything. My sisters and I dove right into trying to help my grandmother, and one of us moved in with my grandmother since my aunt and uncle refused to let her live with them because they didn’t want to be “stuck with her.”
My grandparents were highly held in the eyes of their grandchildren. We spent many summers with them, helping with light office work in their insurance business as we got older.
I’m the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter. I’ve never much wanted the responsibility of becoming the matriarch of the family and never really considered it would be something I would deal with, as my mother’s family lived well into their 90s.
My mother is a force to be reckoned with, and she was probably getting more exercise than I was, always gardening and doing art projects, while she tried to upgrade my grandmother’s house and get a lifetime of clutter cleaned out. My grandparents owned their split-level house since my mother was about seven years old. Brand new and $35k, it was the only home that remained consistent for my entire life, but 60 years of ignoring general maintenance and upkeep left a lot to do, and my mother’s siblings largely ignored my mother's repeated pleas for help.
My grandmother had changed her will to leave the house to my mother after she passed, assuming that would be the natural order of things. So they decided to co-sign loans for new windows on the house since they had never been replaced since 1960, when the house was built.
When my mother had the stroke, they seized on my sisters and me to pay off the window loans with my mother’s social security, even going as far as to threaten to sue my incapacitated mother for fraud when they tried to claim that my grandmother never signed the form. (She did sign the form, but after we asked my grandmother about the situation so that we could hear it from her, my aunt and uncle blocked us from communicating with my grandmother.) They even sent a notarized letter, telling us not to contact her.
I have not been able to see or speak with my grandmother since last Christmas. We were extremely close, and I know that it’s not her doing. They blocked our phone numbers, so we can’t call her, leaving her even more lonely after losing her husband and now my mother.
It’s been particularly traumatic because my mother has been financially destroyed while waiting for Medicaid approval to cover skilled nursing. Anything she had left, she had to pay for some private care when no nursing facilities would take her. We had to hire a Medicaid attorney in Florida in order to qualify. There was simply no money left to give my grandmother for the window loans, and my mother’s attorney advised us to tell my grandmother to not pay on the loans, and it would become a lien on the home — something she wouldn’t have to worry about during her life.
My aunt and uncle didn’t like that. Less money for them. After vicious text attacks, two of the three of us sisters blocked their messages. So they turned their attention to harassing my sister, who was living with my grandmother. My sister and her children are domestic abuse survivors, and my aunt and uncle threatened to call CPS on her because they don’t like that she’s a teacher and homeschools her children.
And so they did call CPS, even after we sent them a cease and desist letter from our attorney.
During all of this mess, I lost my job again. I was driving daily in to see my mother, staying across the country from my home in Washington State. I had been gone for 10 months, and we had to stay with mother daily, as the hospitals and nursing facilities had horrendous care of our mother. She has had almost constant infections, and after the stroke, it left her with permanent brain damage and dementia.
One day in January, I was driving in to see her for the day and almost felt like a normal person again when a herd of deer crossed the road. As I slammed on my brakes, I thought I had avoided any collisions, but then I looked up to see that the truck in front of me had hit a deer, and it was flying straight towards me.
There was nothing I could do. The deer totaled my one asset, a paid-off late model car. I was already staying long-term with lifelong friends, and now I was without a vehicle.
I drove my mom to Florida so she could live at my sister’s house, but within a week she needed to be taken to the ER because she kept trying to get out of bed every five minutes, and she hadn’t been like that prior to the drive. Something had changed dramatically in her ability to reason.
We took her to the ER, and she remained in the hospital for the next four months. We had to fight with the rotation of doctors to try to find answers about what could make her go from healthy and independent to this state so quickly. In medicine, most of them just want to treat the symptoms. They don’t dig to find the causes unless you’re able to plead with them to find answers and get a doctor who will advocate for you.
My mother developed PRES syndrome, a strep infection, and had seizures, one of them called “status epilepticus,” which had her on a ventilator for two weeks. This was the second time we thought we were losing her.
She survived, but several weeks later, a therapist left her unattended out of bed even though they knew she was a fall risk and had fallen several times before, and this time, she hit her head, causing multiple more brain bleeds and swelling.
She fell the day my sister left Florida to go on a long-planned vacation with my other sister, and I was staying at my sister’s home in Florida. They told us that she was dying, and when my sisters returned from their much-needed mental health break after 7 months of being with mom and advocating for her daily, we were advised to put her in hospice. They told us to fly in my children and bring everyone in to say goodbyes.
Mom did a magic thing and rallied for about three days, where she was almost herself. She couldn’t get out all the words, but we had a chance to say everything we needed to say.
My father went fast during a heart attack. This has been such a different terrifying experience to witness, because now my anxiety lies in the horrific reality that this could happen to me.
Mom didn’t die in May, and hospice kicked her out of their program. The rehabilitation facility she went to refused to give her medications properly. They ended up putting her on lithium, took her off her anti-seizure medications, and never told us.
I had to return to Washington to start a new job and try to piece together my life and get my son ready to move to Florida after he graduates college this month.
My sister left for two weeks to return to her second home in Pennsylvania for work and for her son to see his father. A lot of the mental load with insurance and lawyers for Medicaid went to her, as the HR Benefits expert in the family and the one who remained in Florida.
When she returned from her trip, she found my mother in a comatose state, and that’s when she found out they were dosing my mom with lithium. She demanded they stop the lithium, but out of no other reason we can find except spite, they stopped her regular meds as well, and two days later, mom was rushed again to the ER after suffering another status epilepticus seizure as well as a grand mal.
Our third sister has just moved out on her own due to my aunt and uncle’s harassment, and they’re now selling my grandmother’s house and all of her possessions and putting her in a nursing home against her wishes. My cousins were given the opportunity to walk through the house and claim loved objects and heirlooms, but my sisters and I were not.
As vicious as my aunt has been, we found out she is terminally ill too. We never blocked my aunt and uncle from visiting my mother, though there were a few weeks that my mother asked for them to not come. We were blamed for that even though it was our mom’s choice. My sister even sent my aunt a chemo care gift set to help ease her treatments with a nice note full of well wishes.
It wasn’t enough to let bygones be bygones, and when I requested to be able to speak with my grandmother, my aunt sent me a horrific text, criticizing that my sisters and I don’t do enough for my mother when we have lived in a daily hell for almost a year. She told us we were bad daughters, and we should be ashamed when they are putting my perfectly abled grandmother into a nursing home. She said I am not allowed to speak with my grandmother because we didn’t pay for the window loan, as if my grandmother would say that. She told me that the “rest of our family” (extended cousins) were laughing at us on social media when we write about the experiences we go through. We don’t write for validation. We write in grief. We write to share our experiences with death, long-term illness, and the medical system, which is already broken and, I fear, about to be overwhelmed with Boomers and (recently announced) Xennials dying young.
I’ve lost my Nana. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to speak with her again.
I’m losing my mom. They told us today that she’s in a persistent vegetative state and we have to decide whether to install a permanent feeding tube when, a week ago, she could eat solid foods.
I can’t afford therapy due to working a contract job right now. There are no health benefits. You can’t go through significant deaths without feeling a shift in who you are. I know I’ll need to talk this out with a professional at some point soon, once I’m able to gain stable employment and rebuild my life AGAIN.
It’s a life event in which you know there was a “before” and an “after,” and I’m stuck between the two.
I feel like I’ve been stuck in one of Dante’s levels of hell. Even worse, my mother is stuck in another level of hell, and I’m facing having to make the decision to refuse her life support.
I don’t hate my aunt and uncle. I know they love my mother, but I don’t understand how their grief makes them lash out at her children, who are doing our best to give my mother the best care available while we all raise our own children, as all three of us are single mothers and white collar professionals.
Sometimes my sisters and I have a moment of levity when we say we would love to post a billboard with my aunt and uncles faces on it that says, “These people threatened to sue an incapacitated woman for fraud so they could inherit more money and called CPS to take my sister’s children because she wouldn’t obey them, as a 43-year-old adult.”
Mom used to say when we were kids that she was going to “have a brain hemorrhage” whenever she got upset. I think about how weird it is that she was so accurate in predicting that. I wonder if her karma was bad. I had the chaplains visit her as often as they could because I wanted her to die feeling the comfort of her religious beliefs about heaven. I’m not a Christian (it’s complicated), but I know that’s what she believed, and it would be a shame to bail on a lifetime of religious dogma at the end, on the cusp of her heaven.
I am so proud of my son for graduating this month, as he’s the oldest of the next generation and he’s neurodivergent. I move him down to Florida for the Disney College Program in three weeks, and I suspect we will be losing mom at this time. I’m devastated she doesn’t get to celebrate this with us or even recognize it. I can’t take time off work when she dies, financially. I’m finally close to where I can plan for a month ahead, and even that has been a long road.
I didn’t think it would be like this.
I’ve read a theory that you can’t truly be at your greatest until you’re released from the expectations of your parents when they die.
I didn’t have an idyllic childhood, but I’ve overcome the traumas as they came, and I love my parents deeply. I think my parents did the best they could, and they put the greatest of themselves into us while they were alive.
Losing your parents and figuring out life without them is a “becoming” story.
It’s the weight of a thousand mistakes that the previous generation made, now being handed to you to solve for your children.
It’s aging in its heaviness and feels like walking through molasses while carrying a bear.
My kids see my grief daily in the form of depression and weight gain. But I keep fighting because there’s a “comeback,” and I know I have work to do now so that my kids aren’t in this situation when it’s my turn.
It’s your own mortality staring back at you in the mirror every day and asking with an aggressive chest-bump, “What are you going to do about it?”
The only honest answer is that I’ll get through it now and understand it later.
